On Great Writing (on the Sublime) Book

The below is ONLY for hardcore rhetoric nerds.

LONGINUS On The Sublime

...or how to be real fucking dull while lecturing us on how not to be real fucking dull.

This is one of those rhetorics that reminds me of why I love the Sophists. They didn't come from posh backgrounds and had to sing for their suppers, so had an immediate pecuniary interest in being interesting, handily giving demonstrative lessons on how to be interesting, unlike so many classical rhetoricians who would instruct us on such without it ever occurring that they themselves should obey their own rhetorical success formulas, if only to see if they really have legs. Unfortunately there's so much more of this stuff laying around than there is of those dudes who were on the road all the time, peddling their tropes and figures back when rhetoric got RESPECK.

Instead of being demonstrative his ownself, Longinus relies on Herotodus, Homer, and Xenophon for excitement-charged examples of how one approaches the sublime in thought, speech, and writing, apparently unaware of his remaining a sober counter-example all the way through.

No rhetorician writes without some categories and lists, and here Longinus provides a program that tweaks the classical standard canon by beginning with sources rather than just elements, effects or appeals: in writing and speech, sublimity has five sources, the first two of which are not teachable but spring from superior character.

Five sources of sublimity:

1)Grandeur of thought

2)Vigorous and spirited treatment of passions

3)A certain artifice in the employment of figuresa)figures of thought
b)figures of speech4)Dignified expression
a)diction
b)metaphors5)Majesty and elevation of structure

He accidentally lets #2 have to do with tropes and figures which gives it a hazy overlap with #3, and--oops--metaphors (from #4) are figures, too. Meanwhile his descriptions of #1 (Elevated Mind) and #2 (Vigorous Treatment of the Passions) are wordy obfuscations of what are basically tautological definitions (e.g. grandeur of thought=ennobled intellect=sublime soul, yadda yadda)

He then goes through some handy tips.

Ways to achieve sublimity:

*Copy people like Plato

*Employ enthralling imagery, not just argument

*Use cool figures:
*Question and answer form*Asyndeton--a rush of assertions, like "Clashing their shields together they pushed, they fought, they slew, they fell." --Xenophon*Mix it up: "continual variation, the intrinsic force of these repetitions and broken clauses, so that this order seems irregular, and conversely this irregularity acquires a certain measure of order."*Hyperbaton: "By hyperbaton we mean a transposition of words or thoughts from their usual order, bearing unmistakably the characteristic stamp of violent mental agitation." [Especially when hidden: "For art is then perfect when it seems to be nature, and nature, again, is most effective when pervaded by the unseen presence of art."]*Make plurals into singular for concentration, or singular into plurals to broaden and maximize effect.*Bring past events to the present tense to create immediacy*Change of person: Switching to 1st person to relate speech is preferred over "Hector said so and so"*Paraphrasis to be used carefully and sparingly (rewording a familiar phrase to a novel one)*Hyperbole, but only when it grows naturally from the subject.

Unusual for this kind of lesson is his emphasis on hyperbaton and other tropes of interruptedness, broken rhythm, or incompletion. He emphasizes the effect of an orator or writer being so overcome with sublime feeling that he must forgo regular sentence flow and rhythm and go for staccato bullet-point articulation.
It's funny reading such a coolly calculated description of how to falsely affect that from someone whose style is far from what it describes.

Just as curious is his emphasis on hyperbole. While he warns about how its improper use makes a joke of its speaker, he has no reservations about putting it above almost all the other tropes, neglecting litotes and hordes of other (see what I did there?) tropes of irony. Longinus is crazy weak on irony, such that one wonders if he "got" Quintilian at all, as he's mentioned nowhere. To be fair, though, most of what the mysterious Longinus wrote (they're not even sure about his name) is lost to us, and I guess you could make an argument that irony isn't part of the sublime but I don't roll like that.

Another curious item here is his elevation of the elsewhere marginal technique of switching person when relating something. I do it all the time, but when you do it nowadays no one notices. See?

Longinus's imagination has been seriously electro-fenced-in by Plato and Aristotle and this is reason enough to dismiss him as just another teensy step toward the dark ages as--as rhet nerds know--nothing hampered the flowering of rhetorical sublimity more than Plato's strawman-scattered rigged reality-TV-of-the-time "dialogs" and Aristotle's Assburgers OCD category madness, but that's just between and/or among us, right? I don't want to get into a big thing here with people who shouldn't even be reading this far. This is just between us, right?